Modernization theories emphasize the role of long-term social forces sweeping like tsunamis across the ocean, transforming civic engagement and democratic states around the globe in their wake. Yet despite the attractive appeal of these accounts, it is also well established that levels of electoral participation can vary substantially, even among societies at relatively similar levels of socioeconomic development – the contrasts, for example, between the United States and Germany, Hungary and Poland, Colombia and Uruguay. A glance at the results of parliamentary elections worldwide during the 1990s reveals stark contrasts in the number of citizens casting their votes at the ballot box (see Figure 4.1). Over 90 percent of the voting age population (VAP) participated in Malta, Uruguay, and Indonesia, compared to less than a third in Mali, Colombia, and Senegal. Even within the more limited universe of established democracies, all relatively affluent societies, during the 1990s turnout in parliamentary elections ranged from over 80 percent in Iceland, Greece, Italy, Belgium, and Israel to less than 50 percent of the voting-age population in the United States and Switzerland.

Ever since the first classic studies of nonvoting by American political scientists Charles Merriam in 1924 and Harold Gosnell in 1930, and by the Swedish sociologist Herbert Tingsten in 1937, comparative research has sought to understand the reasons for these cross-national differences. Many studies trying to explain variations among established democracies have emphasized the importance of the institutional and legal arrangements for registration and voting, which affect the costs and benefits of electoral activism.